Expert: James Michael Roan - 8/17/2007

Question
I know you don't diagnose over the internet, but wanted your opinion about my son.  He had his 4th birthday in July.  He recently had a developmental evaluation because he scored very low on his pre-school entrance eval.  His BDI-2 results were:
Receptive Language: Percentile Rank-5, 41 months, Delay
Expressive Language:  Percentile Rank-1, 32 months, Delay
Cognition:  Percentile Rank-1, 34 months, Delay
Gross Motor:  Percentile Rank-84, 59 months, Age Appropriate

He also tested at <2 years old on his speech eval.  He has been approved for special education and speech therapy.  My husband and I have noticed some things at home that have us concerned.  He sometimes does strange things.  Like he repeatedly went into his closet and took all of his clothes off the hangers and threw them on the floor.  When we asked him why, he just said 'because' over and over again.  Today he did it again and began breaking all of the hangers into little pieces.  When we asked him why he said 'because' a few times and then said 'I don't like them.'  We didn't know what to say to that!

He doesn't like loud noises and will sit with his hands over his ears if he thinks the music is too loud.  

He knows his colors if you say the name of the color first, like 'Which crayon is blue?'.  If you say 'What color is this crayon?', he can't get any of them right.

He has asked me every day for the last 5 weeks what the name of his pre-school teacher will be.  He asks every time like it is the first time and he has no idea what the answer is.

This may sound silly, but he likes to run in circles a lot.  He will also run away from us unexpectedly and completely ignore us calling his name.  We were at a park recently and he just took off, despite us yelling his name.  My husband had to run after him and by the time he caught up to him he was very far away.  He has done that several times.  It is very frightening when he runs away like that and doesn't respond to us.

Does this sound like anything related to autism, or do you think it is just a learning disability?  We are very worried about him.  I intend to bring up my concerns with his pre-school teacher when he starts next week.

Thanks for your time!


Answer
Hi Rebecca;

So far, everything you have described could be due to language delay and being 4 years old. I suggest you go to my web site and complete the M-CHAT and score it. It's free and I can discuss the results with you. Autism is primarily a social delay that affects other areas of development like communication, both verbal and nonverbal.

www.autismspectrumdisorderfoundation.org

Kind regards,
James